Republican-controlled state legislatures have passed legislation that restricts access to voting, allows partisan gerrymandering, and politicizes the counting of votes. Federal legislation is critical to block these state-level laws.
Twenty of Delaware’s Democratic lawmakers wrote to Senators Tom Carper and Chris Coons to express their “concerns about the insidious erosion of voting rights across our nation” by “Republican state legislators, including here in Delaware, who are trying to silence voters, particularly Black and Brown Americans.”
The legislators thanked Delaware’s U.S. senators for their strong support of the For the People Act, a bill “to guarantee that all Delawareans (and all Americans) can have the freedom to vote.” They also urged Senators Carper and Coons “to do whatever it takes to pass this bill and get it to President Biden’s desk, even if it means reforming the filibuster.” They cited President Obama’s reference to the filibuster as “a relic of the Jim Crow era.”
Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin has stated “the filibuster has a death grip on American democracy,” and “has turned the world’s most deliberative body into one of the world’s most ineffectual bodies.”
The filibuster didn’t exist for the first 50 years of the Senate. Its rules are not set in stone. Between 1969 and 2014, 161 exceptions to its supermajority requirement were created.
It is critical that Carper and Coons join their Democratic peers and support a simple majority carveout for voting rights legislation. As 20 of Delaware’s lawmakers reminded them, “A minority of U.S. senators should not be able to filibuster our sacred right to vote.”
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